Iringa: Isimila, Mkwawa and the Road to Ruaha

The highland town before Ruaha

Iringa stands on an escarpment above the Little Ruaha valley, high enough to be genuinely cool, on the A7 between Dar es Salaam and the Zambian border. Almost everyone who stays here is on their way to Ruaha National Park, which TANAPA puts at roughly two to three and a half hours away by road via Tungamalenga.

That makes Iringa the standard overnight on the overland southern circuit. It is also, unusually for a staging town, a place with enough of its own content to justify a full day: one of the most important stone age sites in the world sits fifteen or so kilometres outside it, and the history of the Hehe resistance to German conquest is concentrated within half an hour’s drive.

Mkwawa, and the war the Germans nearly lost

Before the colonial period the country around Iringa was the domain of Mtwa Mkwawa, the Hehe chief. Iringa Municipal Council’s own history states that the area was his protectorate before German colonisation, and that in 1898 the Germans established their rule, opened a market for agricultural produce and set up their headquarters in the town. Other accounts date the German military station to 1896; both dates circulate and the difference is worth knowing rather than resolving here.

What is not in dispute is the fighting. TANAPA’s own record of the Mtwa Mkwawa Museum states that Mkwawa defeated the Germans at the battle of Lugalo on 17 August 1891, killing three hundred soldiers including their commander, Emil von Zelewsky. A second war between the Hehe and the Germans ran from 28 October 1894 to 1898, during which Mkwawa took his own life by shooting himself in the Mlambalasi area rather than be captured.

The Germans decapitated him and took his skull to a museum in Bremen. It was returned to Tanzania on 19 June 1954 and is now kept at the museum in Kalenga village. That museum is the single most significant historical site in the region and one of the very few places in East Africa where an object of that kind is held and displayed by the community it belongs to. Museum visits here are worth a guide, because there is little interpretation on site.

Isimila

Isimila is a stone age site in a gorge roughly sixteen kilometres south of Iringa, and TANAPA lists it among the antiquities in its own care.

TANAPA describes it as one of the famous geological and archaeological sites showing evidence of early stone tools, and dates the tools in the Isimila gorge specifically to the latest Acheulian tradition, between 300,000 and 400,000 years ago. Older summaries putting the site at around half a million years are in wide circulation; TANAPA’s own figure is the narrower one given here.

What makes the site unusual, in TANAPA’s words, is the quantity of Acheulian tools lying on the surface — scrapers, hand axes, hammerstones, sling shots, knives and spears. The setting is as striking as the archaeology: eroded sandstone pillars and small canyons that would be worth the diversion on their own. It is a short detour from the highway and the natural first stop for anyone interested in archaeological sites.

The town itself

Iringa Municipal Council covers 331.4 square kilometres and became a town council in 1955 and a municipality in 1988. The town centre is compact, walkable and noticeably cooler than anywhere on the coast, with a street market, German-era buildings and a position on the escarpment that gives it long views.

The Iringa Boma, built in the early 1900s, reopened as a regional museum and cultural centre in 2016. It is independently run, and the same applies to the Kalenga museum — a point worth knowing because the national museums network and the independent museums publish different amounts of information and keep different hours.

Gangilonga Rock rises above the town and is associated with Mkwawa; it is a short climb and a viewpoint. Rock paintings at Igeleke are frequently listed in visitor material and thinly documented: almost everything published about them is duplicated commercial copy, so treat claims about them cautiously and go with a local guide rather than a description.

A crafts centre in the town, Neema Crafts, runs a workshop and visitor programme and publishes its own visiting information. Craft workshop visits in Tanzania are otherwise mostly arranged informally, so a centre that states its own terms is genuinely useful.

Food and drink

Iringa is in the belt where ulanzi is made — bamboo wine, tapped from the sap of young bamboo shoots, produced principally in Njombe, Iringa, Mbeya and Ruvuma. It is a regional drink rather than a national one and it is genuinely local: fresh, low in alcohol, and best drunk where it is tapped. The food and market tours guide covers the wider picture.

The highlands south of the town are tea country, and the estates at Mufindi carry some of the largest plantings in Tanzania.

Getting there

Iringa sits on the A7, the main road from Dar es Salaam to Mbeya and Zambia, about a day’s drive from the coast with the Mikumi and Udzungwa stops on the way. Regional flights serve Iringa, and the town is the usual road transfer point for travellers flying part of the way south. The guide to covering the southern circuit by road and air sets out the honest drive times on the A7 and what a flight south saves.

When to go

The Tanzania Meteorological Authority classifies this part of the country as unimodal: one rainy season from November into April or May, wetter in its second half, unlike the two-season pattern of the northern highlands and coast. Altitude keeps Iringa cool year round and cold at night in the dry months, which catches out travellers arriving from the coast with coastal luggage.

The dry months from June to October suit the Ruaha leg and give reliable roads on the Isimila and Kalenga detours. The wet months are green and quiet, and the archaeology and the museums are unaffected by rain. The seasonal guide to the south and west covers why this part of the country runs on a single wet season.

Where it fits in a trip

Iringa is the pivot of the overland southern circuit. The standard sequence is Dar es Salaam, Morogoro, Mikumi, Udzungwa, Iringa, Ruaha — and Iringa is where the trip changes from savanna and forest to the dry highlands. How many nights that sequence needs is worked through in the guide to how long a Tanzanian trip has to be.

Travellers continuing rather than turning back head south-west into the Southern Highlands through Mufindi and Njombe to Mbeya, or east to the Uzungwa Scarp Nature Forest Reserve, which Tanzania Forest Services describes as about 100 kilometres from Iringa by road through Kilolo District.

Common questions